At Deadline - SHARE Announces Helene Armitage to Give Keynote Address at SHARE in San Jose
SHARE has announced that Helene Armitage, vice president of Systems Software Development and Lab Based Services for IBM’s Systems & Technology Group, will present the keynote address titled "Virtualization and the Future of the Datacenter" at the upcoming SHARE conference. The conference will be held August 10-15 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.
Armitage's keynote presentation will describe IBM's vision for virtualization and IT simplification, technology direction with ensembles, an integrated systems approach to virtualization and plans for early customer engagements. Ensembles provide better systems integration, simplicity and a better overall management structure, and will provide the foundation for a cost-effective, resilient, secure, energy-efficient and dynamic data center.
Armitage has more than 20 years of experience in software engineering and management with IBM and other industry leaders spanning Unix systems, open systems, object technology and international standards. For more information about SHARE in San Jose and to register, go here.
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Software AG Expands Real-Time Data Interoperability for Mainframe and Distributed Systems
At last week’s Software AG International User Groups Conference in Spain, the vendor released two new products to support real-time, standards-based data interoperability between mainframe and distributed systems. For users of Software AG's Natural programming language, there is the Natural SQL Gateway to access data stored on open systems SQL databases, including DB2, Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server. Additionally, Event Replicator for Adabas on Open Systems provides real-time replication of Adabas data across databases running on distributed systems such as Unix, Linux and Windows.
The introduction of the new products is part of a continuing trend for Software AG, a provider of business infrastructure software. "It's about opening up mainframe applications to talk to anything," Bruce Beaman, senior director for Adabas and Natural product marketing for Software AG, told 5 Minute Briefing. “It is being able to access data in any form on any platform from the mainframe. Most of our customers are mainframe customers, and there has always been this impression that Adabas and Natural are closed, proprietary systems." However, he noted, "for some time now - since 2000 - we have worked very hard on alleviating that impression through gateways, replication, Web services." The goal is to enable customers who have longstanding investments in Adabas and Natural to leverage the applications and data on Adabas with any other system they have, he said.
According to Software AG, the new releases are part of its $50 million commitment annually over the next three years for research and development for Adabas and Natural.
Software AG's new Natural SQL Gateway is a solution that enables Natural applications running on the mainframe to easily access data from third-party relational database management systems (RDBMS), such as DB2, Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft SQL server, operating on open systems. Natural SQL Gateway can be used to provide users with a unified view of data spanning multiple applications and databases. The Gateway can also be used to shift non-mission-critical data from mainframe systems to lower cost hardware platforms.
Event Replicator for Adabas on Open Systems uses SQL to automatically replicate Adabas data across third-party databases and messaging systems operating on open systems to ensure that core business data is instantly accessible by other systems, including BI tools and ERP systems, so that all users are operating off of the most complete, up-to-date data possible.
Natural SQL Gateway is available now, and Event Replicator for Adabas on Open Systems is expected to be generally available in Q3 of 2008. For more information, go here.
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GT Software Announces New Release of SOA Toolset
GT Software, a provider of mainframe SOA solutions, announced release 4.0 of its flagship product, Ivory Service Architect. The most significant aspect of the new release is "the ability to bring in systems that would not be what you would consider to be conventional or traditional interfaces," Rob Morris, chief strategy officer for GT Software, told 5 Minute Briefing.
The new version expands the platforms, environments, and formats supported by Ivory to include non-conventional interfaces and applications, both on and off the mainframe. It is an "inclusionary" approach, said Morris. Customers no longer have to limit their business services to standard mainframe interfaces.
Ivory Service Architect consists of Ivory Studio, a graphical modeling environment; Ivory Server, a high-performance SOAP processor with runtime service orchestration; and Ivory Server for Batch. "As of right now, Ivory gives you the ability to create services from things on the mainframe like CICS applications or IMS applications or standard data interfaces," explained Morris. With the new release, systems and technologies such as MQ Series, CORBA, custom applications - even encryption and compression routines - can be included within an Ivory developed Web service. This inclusionary approach ensures that much of the functionality on the mainframe can be leveraged in a composite service.
In addition to broadening the platforms and environments supported by Ivory, Ivory's Source Control Management System allows a new, higher level of team collaboration across Ivory projects, for a team-based, enterprise development approach to mainframe SOA. With this release, according to GT, Ivory also strengthens the concept of callable services, whereby other programs on the mainframe can call anything developed in Ivory, to in turn call non-mainframe Web services. Now, any Ivory Web service can be converted to a callable service, and vice-versa, the vendor said.
Companies using Ivory 4.0 can now incorporate functionality, even applications with variable length interfaces, into their mainframe SOA initiatives, according to Morris. "They no longer have to exclude functionality that doesn't conform to static, conventional interfaces like OTMA, Link3270, or CICS LINK."
For more information, go here.
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Progress Software Expands SOA Portfolio with IONA Technologies, Mindreef Software
Progress Software Corp., a provider of application infrastructure software used to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications, and IONA Technologies, a supplier of software integration technology, announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which Progress Software has agreed to acquire IONA in a deal valued at $162 million.
Progress and Dublin, Ireland-based IONA have had a strong working relationship over the years and play in adjacent spaces, Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress, told 5 Minute Briefing last week following the announcement. "We have had a longstanding and primarily non-competitive relationship with IONA and in fact they have OEMed certain key technologies of ours," he said.
There were four principle drivers for the acquisition, Vandervoort said. The two companies together have a "synergistic" portfolio of SOA infrastructure products with very little overlap. Second, he said, IONA has a "tremendously strong reputation" for operating at the high end of business transaction environments like financial services and telecommunications. A third "real gemstone," he said, is IONA's open source initiative and fourth is IONA's quality of talent - with people across both companies who are aligned in terms of caliber and thought.
Through its Artix product line, IONA provides Web-standards based integration technologies in support of a SOA. In addition, IONA offers open source SOA integration components through its FUSE product line. IONA also has robust CORBA integration technology.
According to Progress, IONA products complement the Progress SOA Portfolio, which consists of products that can be used standalone or together to form an entire SOA infrastructure. With the addition of IONA technology, legacy and high performance applications written in C++ or those built to the CORBA standard, can now expose reusable services that fully participate in a Web-standards SOA implementation. In addition, IONA also has smart endpoint integration with Microsoft's .NET Windows Communications Framework and the popular open source Spring Java application framework. These smart endpoints, service-enabling almost all existing applications, can work within any IT environment through a wide-variety of network protocols and are fully compatible with the Progress Sonic ESB to form a complete SOA backbone for heterogeneous integration and interoperability.
Upon completion of the transaction, which is expected to occur in September pending necessary approvals, IONA will become an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Progress Software. "We're already actively working on plans and integration work," said Vandervoort.
Separately, Progress announced it has also acquired Mindreef, provider of SOA service validation and testing tools. Financial details on the acquisition were not disclosed. Mindreef says the two companies will host a Webinar in mid-July that will “provide information about the acquisition and the new opportunities that will open up.” Mindreef’s main product line, SOAPscope, is designed to provide visibility and enhance quality with SOA-based service deployments.
For more about IONA, go here.
For more about Mindreef, click here. For more about Progress Software, go here.
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